Ryman de Bergerac

Nick Ryman, who has died at 83, was one of the first small British wine producers to buy his way successfully into the French wine trade and the first I interviewed as newly-appointed wine critic of The Scotsman almost half a century ago.

Though not the friendliest of people, he welcomed me to Chateau la Jaubertie, his property in the Bergerac region of central France, treating me to the delicious blend of Sauvignon and Semillon. He had been struggling to develop as a novice winemaker who had previously helped to run Ryman’s, the family stationery firm but had grown fed up with it.

Having dreamed for years of owning his own French vineyard, he spent his share of the family profits on doing exactly that. Though he had no wine experience with which to bring this about, his purchase of a beautiful small chateau fired his enthusiasm and he gained his learning the hard way, battling with foul weather  and other setbacks until reaching eventual triumph.

When I visited him with a handful of other wine scribes he had begun winning his first awards and had produced a  successful sweet Monbazillac.  Drinking the drier Chateau la Jaubertie with him in his garden, and eating lunch cooked by his wife, made all of us wish to take the same risk and settle in the same lovely but neglected part of France where Nick had been developing new methods of wine production that made many local growers seem outmoded.

Nick’s Bergerac whites struck me as the best I had tasted, yet for a time he had trouble marketing them in Britain. In Scotland, Judith Paris - who had set up her small Wines from Paris company after a career in the Scottish Arts Council - did a deal with him and made Chateau la Jaubertie famously available in Edinburgh, but before long they fell out, which was something that Nick appeared to have a talent for doing - his career was tarnished by recurring family disputes and break-ups making him come to seem one of those people who are called their own worst enemy (a description to which Judith could surely have added the words “Not while I am alive”).

Yet his wine was undoubtedly good and I have vivid memories of sipping it in the Bergerac sunshine - no bad weather on that occasion. His tie-up with Majestic Wines appeared to be a success and my first taste of  Chateau la Jaubertie continues to haunt my memory.

31 July 2015
Please visit my blog:  conradkmwilson.blogspot.co.uk

This Week's Wine: Italian Verdicchio

Verdicchio - especially when its name is enhanced with the words “classico” and “superiore” - is one of Italy’s most reliable white wines, dry and firmly structured, with enough flavour to make it interesting.

Most supermarkets stock it in one form or another, in good enough versions to make this product of the Adriatic coast seem a safe buy.

Sipped in a Pesaro restaurant, sometimes under a posher name, it seems the nicest of drinks, the perfect representative of the seaside university town where the composer Rossini was born.

Though now sold mostly in conventionally shaped bottles, it used to be visually identified by the tall, curvaceous amphora bottles in which it was traditionally supplied. Today this is something people have come to associate with poorer-quality Verdicchio, but Sainsbury’s current version, a 2014 “Taste the Difference”  classico, though not a superiore, costing £8, is unapologetically in an amphora bottle and is not to be despised because of that.

Although not markedly better than Waitrose’s 2014 Verdicchio Classico (in an ordinary bottle) at £5.99, it is fresh, thoroughly quaffable and certainly preferable to an average supermarket Pinot Grigio.

A more uncommon Italian white is a Grillo from Sicily, a happy specimen of which is being supplied online by Naked Wines of Norfolk at a not excessive £7.99 per bottle. Slightly stronger than the Sainsbury Verdicchio, this vivacious wine has a bit of bite and can be served as an admirable aperitif.
28 July 2015

Pineau of Memory

The gift of a bottle of Pineau des Charentes  recently given to me by a  friend from Manchester came as a jolt of nostalgia akin to the effect of a madeleine on Marcel Proust.

During my two RAF years at SHAPE in Paris it was my favourite French aperitif, superior in my opinion to the then fashionable Dubonnet. Sipped ice cold, it was one of my little pleasures, its nutty, raisiny taste the equivalent of a good sherry of similar strength. As a product of rustic France, it struck me as delightfully mysterious, surpassed only by the more urbane Italian Punt  e Mes, which I came to enjoy - and still do - a little later.

But Pineau, or the slightly stronger Vieux Pineau which I preferred, disappeared from my sphere of bibulous activities when I returned to Britain, its aroma a distant memory.  It had been introduced to me by a French conscript called Michel Gilbert, whom I got to know at SHAPE and who was deprived of Pineau for a week when he was put on a charge while lugging two heavy boxes of documents from one part of the premises to another. A French colonel, passing him en route, asked him why he had failed to salute, and Michel replied that he thought it would have been ridiculous. He was promptly charged and sentenced to jankers. Later he invited me to his wedding at a charming auberge on the Seine outside Paris, though I have not seen him since.

What happened to him - and to Pineau des Charentes - I do not know. Somehow I never drank it again,  not even  when visiting  France and had the opportunity to do  so. My tastes, I suppose, had moved on. Yet clearly it still exists, and the bottle I unexpectedly received, and quickly drank among friends, bore the mellow old enticing label. But British supermarkets seem not to stock  it, nor does my local wine merchant, though it is available, as most things are, through Amazon.

Whether I go so far as to buy it that way remains to be seen. My favourite aperitif these days is a good white burgundy, which I shall be content to stick to. But the pleasure of tasting Pineau again was  nice.  If you have come across it in Edinburgh, I would be happy to hear from you.
23 July 2015

The Streaming of the Seraglio

While Edinburgh cinemas declined the opportunity to stream  Sunday’s performance of Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail trom Glyndebourne  - Dorking, Bradford, and Milton Keynes were among the unlikely places that laudably accepted it - I seized my chance to watch the company’s transmission of the event on its own website.

It was by no means perfect. Too many blips on the live screening marred the transmission , particularly during the tension of Act Three, but nevertheless I got an impression of what David McVicar’s fine if controversial new production is like, as well as glimpses of the audience enjoying their picnics in the grounds.

Die Entfugrung - originally better known in Britain in its Italian version entitled Il Seraglio and now anglicised as “The Abduction” - is one of Mozart’s longest operas.  The Glyndebourne  version, largely uncut, started at five and finished more than four hours later, which may have been one reason why Edinburgh cinemas rejected it. But sung by a really good young cast, as this one was, it is a  marvellous, though still slightly underrated work, thanks partly to the Austrian Emperor’s famous comment to the composer after the premiere  that it contained “monstrous many notes.”

Dating from 1782, when Mozart was newly arrived in Vienna, it is a startling precursor in some ways of Cosi fan tutte, with a Fiordiligi-like heroine torn between two men and a story balanced on a knife-edge between the comic and the distraught.

McVicar, I thought, brought out this aspect of the piece more disturbingly than most directors, just as Glyndebourne’s new young music director, Robin Ticciati, admirably conveyed the music’s mixture of drama and exuberance, shot through with the clash of Turkish percussion, which was all the rage in Vienna at the time (it can even be heard in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony).

Yet there is nothing racist in the approach, as there evidently is in the new production at Aix-en-Provence, which has provoked such fears of terrorist reaction that members of the audience have been searched for weapons as they arrive.

McVicar’s production is impressively truthful and unsensationalist, though undeniably irascible. Everyone, even the usually amicable Pedrillo, is made to seem on the point of exploding with impatience to the extent that Osmin, the Pasha’s threatening overseer, is not the accustomed shaven-headed brute but looks like someone fair-haired  and nasty out of Wagner’s Ring.

Though some of the London critics in their reviews chose to share the Emperor’s complaint about too many notes, the chance to hear a really complete performance  of the work struck me as well worth taking. Whether or not there were too many spoken words, they were part of the character of the piece and the extra music (including the heroic Belmonte’s Act Three aria, almost always omitted) was compensation. It was also a performance enlivened by its passionate and beautifully focused power of observation. When the DVD is issued next year I shall be buying it.
20 July 2015

God's Tenor

The death of Jon Vickers the other day  at the age of 88 prompted me to listen to him again in the DVD of one of his major roles - Don Jose in the Salzburg Festival performance of Bizet’s Carmen with Grace Bumbry in the title role and Herbert von Karajan as conductor.

The lavishly detailed   production by the conductor himself, was very much a spectacular Karajan show, with dozens of extras, a full Spanish corps de ballet, clacking heels,  sumptuous costumes, and a Seville townscape for Act One, complete with sunshine, busy cafe terrace and big stairways - the obverse, in every way,  of the sombre , characteristically “urinary” Beito production streamed on July 1 from the London Coliseum.

Yet the heart of the Karajan performance was where it belonged, not only down in the Salzburg orchestra pit with the Vienna Philharmonic but in the outsize personalities of Vickers (slightly bandy-legged in uniform) and the alluring Bumbry  themselves, along with the expressive, wide-eyed Mirella Freni as Micaela. 

Although, like Beito, Karajan shunned the spoken dialogue which is an essential feature of Bizet’s masterpiece, the strengths - including the melodic sweetness -  of the opera shone through, however grand the scale. God’s Tenor, as Vickers used to be nicknamed, was in eloquent form. Though his Christian zeal - his first wife was a missionary’s daughter and  he pulled out of two major productions of Tannhauser because he deemed Wagner’s opera to be blasphemous - affected much of his career, sometimes to its detriment, his granite-voiced singing was of fierce intensity.

My wife, watching part of Act Two   of Carmen over my shoulder, remarked that he looked just like Billy Graham - an unexpected but apt comment, given his religious background, bringing to mind a profile of him written by Andrew Porter which said that the trouble with Vickers was that there were  moments when he wondered whether he was watching and hearing Jon Vickers as Peter Grimes  or Peter Grimes as Jon Vickers.

It was this aspect of the great, craggy-faced tenor, son of a Canadian  lay preacher, which my wife seemed to have picked up, and which undoubtedly marred some of his performances, memorable though they were. I heard him seldom - as Verdi’s Otello and Handel’s Samson - and almost always in London. But it was a memorable, if sometimes exhausting and finally exhausted voice. Karajan was said to admire him enormously but Sir Georg Solti - a “bully” according to Vickers, though Vickers seemed to be a bit of a bully himself - fell out with him and refused to work with him. 

And his Don Jose? Undoubtedly impressive,not least in the Flower Song,  though his soft notes, as light as feathers in contrast with what has been called the blunderbuss effect of his loud ones, are what stick in the memory.  It is easy to imagine what his Messiah, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, must have been like - the sound of God’s Tenor at full throttle, but at times on the edge of inaudibility,  was something to savour.

17 July 2015 

Please visit my blog:  conradkmwilson.blogspot.co.uk

This Week’s Wines: Summer Whites

If you find Sancerre too lush for your palate as a summer sauvignon, and perhaps also too pricey, an alternative lies in a Touraine Sauvignon, which comes from the same French region but is more mineral in flavour and costs a lot less. Waitrose’s own-label version at £6.99  from Cave de Oisly is a particularly nice example, refreshingly dry but with ample flavour.

Also worth sampling,  from a different part of France is Simpson’s Sauvignon, a product  of the Languedoc. which Naked Wines of Norfolk, now operating  in conjunction with Majestic Wines, sell for £7.99.

Charles Simpson, in partnership with his wife Ruth, is a young Englishman, formerly in pharmaceuticals, now working in southern France under the name of Simpsons of Saint Rose. His Sauvignon is not his only wine - his low-yield Roussanne at £9.99 is a rarity also worth drinking and deemed a fine match for crab.

More readily accessible, however, are a pair of classic  white burgundies, a St Veran and an even better Montagny, both being marketed by Tesco around the same sort of  price. The Montagny can be bought by the half case (six bottles) for under £60. Strongly recommended.
11 July 2015

A Carmen for Today

Gratuitously vicious and violent, Calixto Bieto’s English National Opera  production of Carmen, streamed earlier this month from the London Coliseum to cinemas everywhere, was in some respects less lethal than expected. Though his devotion for opera as sensationalism was emphatically still present, it was not wholly at odds with the Merimee story on which Bizet based his final opera.

The feebleness with which it has been so often characterised - it was the first opera I saw as a boy and I thought it too soft-edged - was ruthlessly swept aside. But what replaced it was musically unconvincing. Carmen is a sublime example of French lyricism, and its beauty needs to be respected. By Beito, alas, it wasn’t.

The heroine’s “goodness”, as opposed to her badness, was famously portrayed by Teresa Bergaza at the 1977 Edinburgh Festival  in a performance where her feminism, not her sluttishness, was what mattered. Some people thought her too puritanical for the part, but with Placido Domingo as her Don Jose the combination worked, and her death was a feminist victory.

Viewed in remorseless close-up, there was no doubt about Carmen’s sluttishness in Justina Gringyte’s brassy ENO portrayal. Even Micaela, in Bieto’s hands, became something of a slut as she wobbled round the stage in high-heeled shoes, in total defiance of the tenderness of her music.Yet Eleanor Dennis in this role gave us the best singing of the evening, even when Beito was intent on making her respond with triumph when she persuaded Don Jose to return to his mother at the end of Act Three.

Beito’s was, in fact, a Carmen without dramatic contrast. Eric Cutler’s big, bullish Don Jose was a long way from Domingo’s, and sounded merely crude in the Flower Song. Leigh Melrose’s apparently world-famous portrayal of Escamillo, thanks to Beito’s updating, seemed no more than an Al Caponish gangster in Act Two.

Nor was the decor helpful. Lilias Pasta’s tavern was non-existent, and the mountain scene was a car park big enough for five cars to be brought on to the Coliseum stage - a triumph of sorts. In Act One, shorn of its lyricism by one of Beito’s scenes of public urination, the Spanish flag was made to symbolise the barracks and cigarette factory. Spoken dialogue, perhaps fortunately in the circumstances, was in short supply. The English translation, for once all too audible, was crude.

Yet the final act was an unexpected success. The excellent ENO Chorus sang vividly from the front of the stage. The chalk circle within which Carmen and Don Jose brought the opera to its climax, was effective. Richard Armstrong, as he did in the days when he was  Scottish Opera’s expert music director, proved himself a real conductor, even if the orchestral reproduction in Castle Douglas’s nice little cinema, where we heard it, sounded far too loud.

Operatic streaming has become one of the success stories of modern times, enabling more and more people to experience famous productions from which - for reasons of distance and high ticket prices - they are customarily excluded. Though this Carmen was not one of the better examples of beaming live opera to the masses, it showed what has become possible. Along with DVD, a more subtle format, opera streaming is one of the musical assets of the day.

10 July 2015

Happy Holidays!

Conrad's blog is on holiday until 10th July, when it will resume with a review of the streaming of the ENO Carmen.

Fathers' Day

Orkney Days and Nights

From 1977, when it was founded, until 1990, when I stopped going to it, the St Magnus Festival in Orkney was my annual midsummer escape. Presided over by Peter Maxwell Davies and his music, it was my favourite festival of them all, set in two small towns, Kirkwall and Stromness, where one event led straight into the next, and the last of them each night led into the next day’s dawn.

It was the Scottish equivalent of Aldeburgh, Benjamin Britten’s fine little festival in Suffolk.  In both of them you encountered music evoking the landscapes and seascapes amid which you were listening  to it.  Britten’s spoke of the fens, Davies’s of luminous turquoise skies (not every year admittedly, but always hoped for) above Kirkwall harbour, filled with fishing boats each of them  identified, like Mozart masterpieces, with a “K” number.

One day, sauntering with Malcolm Rayment, music critic of The Herald, along the waterfront, we named the boats we were passing. “Look.” I exclaimed, “there’s the early opera Mitridate.”   “And there,” replied Malcolm, “is one of the best of the Salzburg divertimentos for wind and strings.”

On Sundays, prior to to an afternoon recital in the old Stromness hall, we might spot the likes of Gennadi Rozhtdestvensky walking the length of the long narrow High Street before playing piano duets with his wife, Viktoria Postnikova.  Stromness Books and Prints, formerly Broom’s Bookshop, was an essential pedestrian pit-stop, a tiny, cluttered Aladdin’s cave of a place, filled with literary treasure  trove, run by Tam MacPhail, a resident American who had once worked in Jim Haines’s and John Calder’s Paperback Bookshop in Edinburgh, and who was married to Gunnie Moberg, an adventurous, poetic Swedish photographer armed with an Olympus camera, who scoured the islands for the most sensationally picturesque views, which she sometimes captured from the windows of small aircraft  that transported her around.

Near the bookshop, in his council house, lived the Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown. Davies, who set many of Brown’s words, composed some of his best music in his isolated cottage near the Old Man of Hoy. Stone Litany, written for the Scottish National Orchestra and conducted by Alexander Gibson down south in Glasgow, set Davies’s inspiration flowing.

The Blind Fiddler, written for  the Fires of London, Davies’s own chamber group, was unveiled in St Magnus Cathedral. A long work, sung by Mary Thomas,  it ended just at the point where, outside, sunset was soon to become sunrise. On a solitary walk afterwards, I brooded about what I had just heard, then returned to my hotel to write about it.

The place, and its atmosphere, were magic. Each year there was a new Davies work to hear, often more than one - sometimes an opera, performed by local people, or a piano piece, portraying the voyage to Hoy, where the festival invariably ended with a merry party entailing a five-mile walk to Davies’s cottage.

Gradually things expanded. Big works replaced little ones. Isaac Stern arrived with Andre Previn to give the premiere of Davies’s Violin Concerto - not, it seemed to me, one of his greatest works.  A new music arena opened. Davies composed a frolicsome tone poem, Orkney Wedding with Sunrise, now popular around the world.  It ended with a sonorous skirl of bagpipes, even though it is fiddles, rather than pipes, which are the Orcadian instruments that matter.

The old visions began to fade.The rough-hewn voice of Ted Hughes, declaiming his poetry in the Pier Art Gallery, hangs ever more distantly in the air.  Recently Davies has been  ailing. George Mackay Brown is dead, and so are Gunnie Moberg, who died before her time, whose pictures were so redolent of Mackay Brown,  and Archie Bevan, teacher and co-founder of the festival.

Before these things befell, I had stopped attending. I had had my fill.  The festival was recognisably changing. The event as it originally was was wonderful. To venture back might be too daunting but the memory - of stormy organ music in the cathedral, of lobster and scallop suppers with Highland Park whisky after concerts, of sharing  a duck with George Mackay Brown in the Stromness Hotel (“dicey thing, duck,” he remarked as he poked at it with his knife and fork) - lingers on. This year’s St Magnus International Festival, as it is now rather grandly called, opened last Friday.
20 June 2015


www.stmagnusfestival.com

The Full Seraglio

Though it will be a year before the new Glyndebourne production of Mozart’s Turkish comedy, conducted by Robin Ticciati, is released on DVD, the argument has already begun, with The Guardian praising its revelatory aspects and The Times and the Daily Telegraph dismissing it for its prolixity.

For The Guardian, the production’s  completeness is what counts, along with the quality of the performance. Every spoken word, every aria, every possible note of music appears to have been included, to compelling effect,  in the irresistible version presented.

The critic, Tim Ashley, observantly claims that the restoration of so much material, usually omitted, is a rare treat.  For his rivals, however, the whole thing  is merely a drag, which made them  feel like administering the kick in the pants Mozart famously received from his employer  on departing from Salzburg.

But the fact is that Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail is a sublimely copious opera, not necessarily improved by established cuts - the Glyndebourne version evidently has twenty scene changes.  Though the work’s  sheer richness originally disturbed the Austrian emperor - who reputedly responded to it with the words, “Too beautiful for our ears, my dear Mozart, and monstrous many notes”  - the truth is that the composer toiled long and  hard to get it the way he wanted, and that he succeeded brilliantly in his efforts.

The gifted director, David McVicar, has clearly appreciated this aspect of the piece and Robin Ticciati - who, in his concert  performances with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra has proved himself a Mozartian of exceptional promise - has gone as far as to insert a fragment of the great B flat major Wind Serenade, written around the same time, at an appropriate moment in Die Enfuhrung. Too many notes, dear Ticciati? In the context of this production, maybe  not.

More than any other Mozart opera, perhaps, Die Enfuhrung is a work that people like to tamper with. Sir Thomas Beecham, another outstanding Mozartian, used to separate Contanze’s two great arias in Act Two so that they were not heard one after the other. He was wrong to do so, as we now recognise.

Today, as ever, Belmonte’s aria at the start of Act Three is considered gratuitous. But is it really?  Everything, it seems to me, depends on the beauty of the performance. How good or bad  this comprehensive Glyndebourne production is is something we shall not know in Scotland until we see it on DVD. But I look forward to being reassured by it.
17 June 2015

A Revelatory Rosenkavalier

The live DVD recording  of last season’s controversial - though I would prefer to say revelatory - new  production of Der Rosenkavalier at  Glyndebourne has been joyfully released.

Whatever its faults, and I have had difficulty finding any that seriously trouble me, they do not lie with Tara  Erraught, the fine young Irish mezzo-soprano who sang the central role of Octavian and was chided by the London critics for being “dumpy,” “stocky,” and - worst of all -  “fat,” a word which, so far as I know, was employed by only one reviewer, and by him (they were all male)  admittedly obliquely. But the damage was done and, after such a tizz, it seems quite brave of Glyndebourne to have issued its two-disc DVD, showing the entire cast in revealing close-up.

And what do we see? No previous Octavian, in my experience, has been attacked so needlessly  for visual  reasons, though occasionally the word “priggish”  or “arrogant” has been used about exponents of the role in Act Two  - I seem to recall that Janet Baker was thus described  when she sang it for Scottish Opera many years ago.

I thought that Baker, on the whole, was an admirable  Octavian, and I believe that, for different reasons, Tara Erraught is even better.  The difficulty about Octavian is that, as conceived by Strauss and Hofmannsthal, the composer and librettist,  he is a seventeen-year-old boy who is played by a girl - one of the opera world’s most famous “trouser” roles - and has to dress up, in Act One and Act Three, as a chamber maid, just like Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro.

Again like Cherubino he is an aristocrat, and at the start of the opera he is amorously involved with another of the work’s aristocrats, the Marschallin (or field marshal’s wife)  who is attracted to boys when her husband is away. The story grows farcical when the Marschallin’s country cousin, the raucous Baron Ochs, arrives to marry Sophie, daughter of a nouveau riche Viennese family. It’s an arranged marriage - they have never met before - and Octavian gets inextricably involved in the proceedings when he meets Sophie and falls for her, thus bringing his relationship with the Marschallin to an end.

As operatic tradition goes, most exponents of Der Rosenkavalier are more, sometimes much more, mature than they are meant to be. But, usually  being possessors of fine voices, they get away with it. With an uncommonly youthful cast at his disposal, however, Richard Jones, Glyndebourne’s resourceful director, made a virtue out of the the cast available to him and created portrayals of striking truthfulness, without losing the advantage of expressive voices. When not even the Marschallin is shown to be an older woman  - the whole point of the character is that she is actually quite young - their relationships became all the more sharply defined.  Kate Royal, tall, slim, elegant, and silvery-voiced - was an ideal Marschallin. Tara Erraught’s Octavian was a bright-eyed boy, and the fact that she was smaller than the Marschallin seemed perfectly in keeping. Indeed the latter’s interest in adolescent boys (her black pageboy is clearly going to be her next young lover) is vividly put.

Nor is  Lars Woldt’s active young  Baron in any way the clumsy old lecher of tradition. Rude and irritating, yes; maladroit, no. Teodora Gheorghiu’s Sophie, who so quickly sees her future in Octavian and not the Baron, is spot-on. With young Robin Ticciati of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra making his debut as Glyndebourne’s latest music director, the performance is in the right hands. Richard Jones’s production, apart from placing its big brush-strokes correctly, is alert to all the tiny visual details a good Rosenkavalier requires, including a gratuitous but gloriously apt appearance by Sigmund Freud. Though Act Three, with its Verdian bating of the Baron, so akin to that of Falstaff, as usual has its longueurs, I loved the whole thing and am delighted to recommend it.
14 June 2015


 

Musical Times

John Duffus, whose responses to my blog are among the pleasures of writing it, has been back home in Scotland this week en route  to a busy spell on the Continent, where he is attending the Leipzig Bach Festival among other things.

Lunching with him on Monday - Contini’s ristorante  in George Street was our chosen spot  - we inevitably talked about music and about Scottish Opera, for which John once worked before heading for a new life in what we used to call the Far East. There, in Hong Kong and now in Bangkok, along with the odd moment in Bali and detours to North and South America -  even Fitzcarraldo’s Peruvian opera house has been on his itinerary -  he has spent the rest of his career as a high-flying musical events manager, arranging concert appearances for the likes of Pavarotti (ten times), Jessye Norman, Renee Fleming,  Yo Yo Ma, Isaac Stern and many other star names.

While sipping Contini’s house Pinot Grigio, the only Pinot Grigio in Edinburgh to taste (along with Valvona and Crolla’s) as it should, he had much to tell us, including the fact that, at the age of 67, he is writing his memoirs and would like me to read them privately while he is at work on them.  Since they already amount to some 200,000 words, he will clearly need to trim them to a marketable length.

Meanwhile I am looking forward to seeing them and giving him my thoughts. That they will be full of good things - some of which he has already touched upon in his responses to my blog - I have no doubt whatsoever. Vivid musical memoirs are always worth reading, and the fact that John has spent so much time in Asia, while touring the rest of the world, should make his ones very special.

Rudolf Bing’s memoirs of the New York Metropolitan, 5000 Nights at the Opera, which he wrote after leaving the Edinburgh Festival, of which he was the founder, is a classic of its kind, which I find myself returning to periodically. But Scotland was not their particular subject whereas it is in Aberdeen, his hometown, that John’s will begin.

This, at least for  me, should give them an added attraction. What he says about Scottish Opera in the old days, and of its more recent misadventures, is sure to carry a sense of regret - only a few of us now remember what the company was like when its hopes were high - but if John sets it down as prelude to his foreign experiences he will have performed a fascinating service.
9 June 2015

This Week’s Wine: White Rioja

White Rioja, not the most prevalent of wines, could be called an alternative to red Rioja for people who distrust supermarket versions of  the latter.

Whether it is an acceptable substitute is another matter, but Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Rioja Bianco  is perfectly serviceable, if not exactly sensational, correctly priced around the £7 level. It is dry and Spanish, neither much better (taste the difference?)  nor much worse than other Spanish whites of its sort which can be found in supermarkets at this price.

Well, perhaps it is slightly above average, and we recently  thought it perfectly drinkable when sipped fully chilled on one of Edinburgh’s rare warm days. But somehow we never finished the bottle, though we admit we would not be  averse to encountering it in a Barcelona bar.

Much more impressive, however, is Waitrose's latest Gruner Veltliner from Austria, selling at £10.79 but currently available with a 25 per cent discount, which brings it closer to the price of the Rioja.

Produced by Markus Huber, it possesses a lot of Viennese charm and goes nicely with the Glyndebourne performance of Der Rosenkavalier which I have been watching on a newly issued DVD.
5 June 2015

Theodora from the Salzburg Festival

And what’s this? At the start of a two-disc DVD, it could be anyone’s guess. A crowd of people are enthusiastically  assembling for what looks like a lively business conference, with a cocktail party in the offing. The men are in dinner jackets, the women in black dresses. Behind them, a vast array of organ pipes stretches across the breadth of the Salzburg Festspielhaus’s huge cinemascopic stage, where Herbert von Karajan once conducted The Ring.

The crowd of people are, in fact, mostly members of the admirable young Salzburg Bach Choir, laced with some top-quality stars, under the stylish conductorship of Ivor Bolton, who for a time was in charge of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.  Here, with the substantial Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, he continues to prove his worth.

Representing what in Handel’s time would be the forces of evil, the randy, predatory chief executive officer of the business organisation - if that is what it is -  is making a boorish nuisance of himself to the only woman dressed in white, who is today’s personification, we can assume, of the heroine of Handel’s tragic oratorio about Christian martyrdom a long time ago. She brushes him off but he will be back.

Christof Loy’s recent theatrical reinvention of Handel’s great, late masterpiece as a modern opera seria grows gradually underway. Clearly it is Salzburg’s answer to Peter Sellars’s famous Glyndebourne production of the same work, and is a fascinating response not only to Handel but to Sellars at Glyndebourne. Even if you already possess the Glyndebourne DVD, do not resist the temptation to buy the newer one. Each in its own way makes an impressive case for updating the story from Roman antiquity to the present time, while remaining true to the musical eloquence of the original.

Theodora is sung with touching purity, even when her dress is colour-coded from white to scarlet,  by Christine Schaefer, who once sang Berg’s Lulu, a role much less pure, at Glyndebourne - another DVD well worth acquiring -  and who is a famed exponent of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.  The counter tenor Bejun Mehta is ardent as her lover, the secret Christian who faces death with her at the end, and Joseph Kaiser is the fine tenor who sympathises with their plight.

Another tenor, Ryland Davies, the star of some early Scottish Opera productions, plays the small Handelian role of the Messenger.  The sublime Bernarda Fink is Theodora’s devoted supporter (at Glyndebourne it was the lovingly remembered Lorraine Hunt Lieberson)  and Johannes Martin Kranzle portrays  the brutally convivial CEO with ample verve.

Such intelligent updating  brings a gripping new look to the plot, just as it did at Glyndebourne. Thus staged, Handelian drama breathes  afresh.
2 June 2015
 

Theodora at Glyndebourne

What’s this?  Amid TV cameras, excited young supporters are assembling to hear a persuasive politician, with armed bodyguards on each side of him, deliver his message. In the course of his speech he fakes a heart attack, is revived by medics, leaps back to his feet, and continues his harangue.

The reinvention of Handel’s tragic oratorio by the American director Peter Sellars is underway. The singers employ Sellars’s own private, distracting sign language, also used by him in other productions, to convey their emotions. At Glyndebourne in the 1990s, with Wiilliam Christie conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the transformation of this late, long neglected masterpiece was a hit. Dawn Upshaw, Loraine Hunt Lieberson, and the robust counter tenor David Daniels represented Christian morality. The Scandinavian baritone Frode Olsen was the dictatorial voice of evil. It was not the first time a Handel oratorio had been staged  as an opera, but it was done with supreme conviction, as this  three-disc DVD - where it is joined by a no less arresting renovation of the opera  seria  Rodelinda and a jeu d’esprit concocted under the title of A Night with Handel, with the composer’s modern biographer Jonathan Keates as narrator, strikingly continues to confirm.

Rodelinda, directed by Jean Marie Villegier in terms of a 1920s Hollywood monochrome film, again with Christie as the most perceptive of conductors and with the superb  Anna Caterina Antonacci in the title role,   offers similar evidence that Handel updates more satisfyingly than anyone else.

Each aria and ensemble is like a scene from a great silent movie brought to vivid vocal life, complete with subtitles. The plot profits from its melodramatisation as an episode from fascist Italy. The slow unfurling of the story, both emotional and witty, remains as riveting as it must have been when Glyndebourne unveiled  its take on baroque costume drama in the 1990s.

If you do not already possess it in your DVD  collection, buy it now from Amazon at bargain price.
30 May 2015

Handel in Miniature

As a gateway to opera on DVD, Handel has all the qualities that matter - an intimacy of scale even in his most dramatic works, roles that gain new vividness in DVD close-up, plots that can be strikingly (rather than pointlessly) updated, melodies that blossom afresh in their renovated surroundings.

But above all it is the intimacy that counts. This hit me first, long before DVD was invented, at Ledlanet Nights in Kinross-shire, where John Calder’s little opera festival half a century ago staged pioneering productions of Partenope and Agrippina, the first in Scotland and among the first in modern times, which displayed Handel’s sublimity in a way that the annual Messiah in the Usher Hall has never managed to do.

Crammed into that postage-stamp theatre-in-the-round, with the instrumentalists of Leonard Friedman’s Scottish Baroque Ensemble tucked into what seemed little more than a cupboard at the side, the works sprang instantly to life in a manner that Handel seldom did in big surroundings.

Years ahead of today’s great international Handel revival, the performances were triumphs of the most ingenious sort. Seeing these works again on DVD, in stagings from all over Europe, it is exhilarating to rejoice in them anew, in admittedly larger-scale productions but ones that DVD can bring into our homes at far less than opera-house prices.

From time to time this blog will be recommending DVDs worth buying, starting inevitably with David McVicar’s perfectly poised, inspiringly voiced Julius Caesar at Glyndebourne, made possible by the festival’s astute general manager, David Pickard, before anyone had thought of his becoming director (as was announced earlier this week) of the BBC Proms in London.

As the three-disc DVD reveals, McVicar’s was a Handel production that had everything - wit, anguish, the right pace, the right space, beauty, perception, fancy, resourcefulness, and William Christie conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment  (an outfit which, as it happened, David Pickard helped to create).

Sarah Connolly sings Caesar with a brilliance suggestive of the impeccable Claude Rains acting the part in the film of Caesar and Cleopatra. Angelika  Kirchschlager and Patricia Bardon are Pompey’s grieving son and widow.  Christophe Dumaux, that most seemingly eccentric of counter tenors, is the evil Tolomeo with Christopher Maltman as his lascivious henchman. Danielle De Nese is the bewitchingly saucy Cleopatra.

It is an ideal cast  and the updating of the plot, which transforms Caesar’s troops into a sort of kilted Victorian garrison regiment, is superbly conceived.  If you do not already possess a Handel DVD, this is unquestionably the one to start with. I shall be suggesting a few more in future blogs.
27 May 2015

A Carmen Round-up

An upsurge in productions of Carmen usually means that opera companies are worried about revenue. Are last week’s revivals at Glyndebourne and at the London Coliseum a good sign or a bad?

 We can see for ourselves when the ENO version is streamed live to cinemas around Britain on July 1 - we plan to see it in Castle Douglas, when we happen to be in the vicinity.

This morning the two productions prompted the Daily Telegraph to nominate its ten greatest exponents of the role, which rightly included the wonderful Conchita Supervia and, in 1977, Teresa Berganza in the famous Edinburgh Festival production.

In comparison with so many of her rivals, Berganza’s was a  subdued but memorably precise  Carmen - “mysterious and introspective” was how the Telegraph aptly described her in that great performance conducted in the intimacy of the King’s Theatre  by Claudio Abbado with Placido Domingo as Don Jose and Mirella Freni as Micaela.

That was certainly not a Carmen produced on a shoestring, and was probably the most expensive event Edinburgh (with Peter Diamand  as director) ever staged, but in quality it was worth every penny and has stuck strongly in the memory. I feel glad it was here that it happened.

Among recent productions, the most fascinating in my view was the one at the Opera Comique in Paris, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner with Anna Caterina Antonacci in the title role - not at all flashy but attentive, like the production as a whole, to the spoken dialogue (which Bieito’s Coliseum version largely omits) and to scrupulous characterisation  even if the Micaela was a a little too fluttey and the Escamillo lacking in incisiveness.

But Carmen is a far from easy piece. You can buy this performance on DVD and, for its atmosphere, it is well worth acquiring, certainly more so than Herbert von Karajan’s staid performance at the Salzburg Festival. But what a pity Berganza’s portrayal was never filmed on DVD.
25 May 2015

Another season

Scottish Opera’s announcement of its 2015-16 season - proclaimed from the company’s flamboyant new annexe in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal - has brought with it, among some good things, the familiar whiff of expedience, cutback, and cheese-paring.

Handel’s Ariodante, it’s true, is one of his greatest and most poignant operas, brought to the Edinburgh Festival by the Piccola Scala company with a glorious array of counter-tenors  many years ago. The new production, from the team that recently gave us Orlando,  certainly looks promising.

A new Scottish work shared with Music Theatre Wales - Stuart MacRae’s The Devil Inside, with a libretto by Louise Welsh based on a supernatural story by Robert Louis Stevenson - also looks like good news. But a pocket production of Cosi Fan Tutte, destined to tour the Highlands and Lowlands, and co-productions of The Mikado (in conjunction with the D’Oyly Carte), Dvorak’s Rusalka (snared with Grange Park Opera) and Bizet’s Carmen (with Welsh National) make originality seem like a lost cause.

Coming from a company that once staged Cosi with Janet Baker, the small-scale touring production of Mozart’s masterpiece sounds like utilitarian padding - or what Lord Harewood used to describe as spending money to save money. Dvorak’s mermaid opera is a lovely piece, but should the company’s new music director Stuart Stratford be making his debut with an imported production of it?

As for Carmen, it is being done everywhere at the moment, a sure sign that playing safe is prevalent in Britain at present.

Is this really the sort of unadventurous programming that the SNP should feel proud to preside over? With every year that passes, Scottish Opera as we used to know it seems further and further away.
21 May 2015

Travels with a Chorus

As a chronicling critic, I have travelled three times with the  RSNO Chorus - once to Israel  and twice to the United States - in the days when John Currie was chorus master and the schedules were  hugely ambitious.  For me, all three trips required the blessing of Eric Mackay, The Scotsman editor of the period, and he took pains to remind me on each occasion that I was not only a critic but a journalist.  Rightly he recognised that adventures involving some two hundred singers might have their dangers and it was my duty to report them if problems arose.

The tour of Israel in 1972, for example, meant landing in a heavily protected El Al aircraft at Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport, where there had recently been a massacre by Japanese terrorists. In short, I was to keep my eyes peeled even when reviewing a concert of classical music.

But the main trouble in those days was simply getting a phone line to The Scotsman and raising enough cash for the dictating of long and expensive reviews. Most of the hazards in Israel proved to be minor ones, such as attacks of food poisoning in the halls of residence where the choristers were staying or of sunstroke during a day off on the heights of Masada beside the Dead Sea. The concerts themselves, with performances of Brahms’s German Requiem with the Israel Philharmonic conducted by Daniel Barenboim as if it were a vast Mahler symphony, were in comparison trouble-free, even although Currie warned his choristers that a Barenboim performance could be very different from a Barenboim rehearsal.

Nor was there trouble on the first long American tour, a greatly intricate affair which the singers, from the start, were determined to enjoy rather than grumble about, as the RSNO itself traditionally did on such occasions.

It began in the picnic atmosphere of Hollywood Bowl and moved eastwards to Philadelphia via St Louis and a sensational flight over the Grand Canyon. Alexander Gibson, not yet knighted, conducted Belshazzar’s Feast and some Charles Ives with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Danny Kaye dropped by to direct - up to a point - one of the rehearsals. Verdi’s Requiem and Haydn’s Creation, both under Gibson, were sung in the open air in sultry St Louis, in a park beside the Mississippi.

Choristers on such tours turn every concert into a party, but danger was not averted on the next trip to America, and Currie was forewarned of it before take-off from Prestwick. Taking me aside in the departure lounge, he told me that the Cleveland Orchestra was on strike and the first week of concerts looked like being in jeopardy. With the opportunity to back out, if I so wished, I phoned Eric Mackay, who instantly rose to the occasion. Two hundred choristers adrift in America would be a news story in itself, he said, and I should have no hesitation about going.

Immediately after take-off, John Currie went to the front of the cabin in the chartered Boeing 707 to announce  that “something terrible had happened.” The choristers, fearing that  the plane was about to crash on Goat Fell, were relieved to find that nothing worse than a week of cancellations lay ahead. Nevertheless there was an occasional mugging - Cleveland, though the home of a great orchestra, was a perilous city to stay in - and even a hold-up at gunpoint to give me something to write about, even if it distressed the folks back home when they read about what had been happening to beloved relatives.

But in fact nobody was actually injured and matters  were resolved when the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with which the chorus was to appear later in the tour, offered some extra dates before the culminating concert - Carlo Maria Giulini conducting Verdi’s Four Sacred Pieces - was reached. America, in the end, had resourcefully sorted out a tour that could have been a disaster.
19 May 2015